In the past few years, major changes have been taking place in the content management marketplace. Customers who previously considered content management to be a niche application focused on workgroup or departmental deployments for meeting specialized publishing-oriented requirements are increasingly requesting true enterprise deployments designed to get all of their unstructured information under better control. One consequence of this new, expanded view of content management is the convergence of archiving technology with Enterprise Content Management. Another, more significant consequence is a dramatic shift in the very nature of archiving functionality in this expanded content management view.
One dictionary of the English Language defines “archive” in the context of electronic technology as “A long-term storage area, often on magnetic tape, for backup copies of files or for files that are no longer in active use.” However, issues of regulatory compliance, corporate governance, electronic discovery, and intellectual property protection have significantly expanded the requirements to manage content—whether in “active use” or not. Further, the notion that certain kinds of content should be moved to less accessible media such as magnetic tape is also being called into question as online media prices plummet and the risks and costs associated with tape archiving and backup become more fully understood. Finally, as the focus of archiving shifts from a few especially important documents to the majority of all enterprise information, the complexities and expense of deploying separate, large-scale archives for email, business documents, images, rich media, ERP transactions, etc. are driving customers to look at more general, type-agnostic archiving solutions.
These changes have created an opportunities for developers to provide new classes of content management solutions. One product, provided by Oracle of Redwood Shores, Calif., called Universal Online Archiving works like other traditional electronic archives, focusing on managing enormous quantities of historical information, such as that which has reached the point in its lifecycle where content is no longer changing. The solution is called universal in that it manages all different types of static information in a single environment.
One problem with any archive having enormous quantities of historical information is that much of the managed information needs to be maintained so it is readily accessible to business, imaging, compliance, e-discovery, and business continuity applications. While the information content does not change over time, the lifecycle of the information actively continues under a centralized policy manager that controls retention, security, storage management, and even movement of content into and out of the archive.
Accordingly, what is desired is to solve problems relating to the rapid migration of metadata between content storage archives, some of which may be discussed herein. Additionally, what is desired is to reduce drawbacks relating to the rapid migration of metadata between content storage archives, some of which may be discussed herein.